If there’s an upside to having to commute to the office in Utrecht twice a week, a journey that takes two and a half hours each way, it’s getting to walk by the free books table in Utrecht Central stationf our times a week. Though I don’t find something every time, sometimes I do hit the jackpot, as I did here, with NASA official Apollo 16 Preliminary Science Report.
As it says on the tin, this is hundreds of pages on the first scientific findings from what would be the penultimate Moon landing. What self respecting science fiction reader could pass this artifiact of a bygone age up?
The end of Top Gear / The Grand Tour after twentytwo years did hit me harder than I expected.
By far the most rightwing media I regularly enjoyed, knowning full well that Clarkson especially is a reactionary knobhead and despite having no interest whatsoever in cars, for years Top Gear was the highlight of Sunday night television viewing. It was one of the things that both Sandra and I liked, even if she had even less interest in motoring than I had. The Grand Tour was never quite the same but was good fun as well, though you could feel the end was near once they stopped doing regular shows. The specials were still good, but also without the leavings of the normal shows, a bit like eating only your pudding and not the meat.
Still, watching this last episode and especially the last scene it was a reminder of everything that made the Top Gear trio so great together. Despite everything I’ll miss it.
Because my mother volunteers there, I have been frequenting the local church’s charity bookshop. One of the books I bought there the last time was a pop history volume I remember from my parents’ bookcases, about the ancient Greeks, which I literally read until it fell apart as a child. Browsing through it to sate my nostalgia I found something surprising, a familiar looking signature in the two page illustration of Createan bull jumping:
Tucked away on the bottom left there it was: “G. Crepax”. In case you’re not as familiar with European comics, that’s Guido Crepax, the Italian cartoonist who is best known for, as the Lambiek Comiclopedia linked above calls it, “his depictions of elaborate and aesthetic erotic fantasies”. Once I noticed it was him it was quite obvious: compare the illustration above with the Shell advertisement shown on the Comiclopedia e.g. I bought two volumenes of the series (7000 Jaar Wereldgeschiedenis) and both have his illustrations. No actual credits are given in either but the style is unmistakeable. A really fun thing to discover some four decades later.
This is why I haven’t posted since November. Ever since the pandemic normalised working from home I have been thinking about moving back to my hometown. With my parents in their mid-seventies and especially my mother having had a couple of nasty accidents, I wanted to move nearer to my family, most of whom live in the same city. Early last year I decided to get serious about it and started looking for a house to buy. Several false starts later and I found one less than 500 metres away from my parents. Bought it, then had several months of doing all the boring bureaucratic stuff to get a mortgage and get all the various utilities up and running, not to mention arraigning a moving company to get all those books (over 150 boxes ultimately) here. Which left no time and little energy for posting once I could finally move in mid-Novemeber. Sorry.
I have been so very lucky with all this. The apartment I had bought with Sandra back in 2005 sold after literally a week of being listed on Funda, for more money than it cost to buy the house I got here. Originally the idea had been to move all my crap out into storage, renovate and repaint everything before selling it but that never came together and instead it was sold as is. Maybe I could’ve gotten a couple of thousand more for it, but what I got for it was already literally three times what I paid for it, so no point in being greedy.
It has all been stressful but I cannot complain. I now have a house I don’t see myself moving out of ever again, I’m close to where the family is and as a bonus, I can buy new books again without worrying about where to put them.
Have an already nostalgic trip through the Amsterdam Noord of roughly a decade ago when its hipsterfication was just getting into full swing. Soundtrack by Harry Slinger and friends, one of Amsterdam Noord’s more famous sons.
In 2003 II was still living in student accommodation in Amstelveen, just over the border of Amsterdam. A very nice, cheap flat but too small for two people and when Sandra decided she wanted to move out of England to come live with me, the hunt was on for a bigger, cheap apartment we could rent. What ended up happening was that we semi-legally rented the living space attached to the office of a local political party that shall remain anonymous. This was not sustainable, especially after said party moved their offices into the centre of Amsterdam, away from Noord. Renting a new flat was impossible, so instead we ended up buying the cheapest house we could afford on my shitty salary back then. In 2005 therefore we moved from the west side of Amsterdam Noord, over the canal to the east side, to the Vogelbuurt, just off the Meeuwenlaan.
The new house was ex-social housing, built just after the First World War, intended as housing for the workers of the factories had been established there not long before. When we bought the house, many of these factories and workspaces were still there, just across the road from us. Amsterdam Noord, across the IJ away from the rest of the city, was seen as both not quite Amsterdam and one of its worst parts. Lots of cheap housing, not that much to do and for anything really interesting you have to take the ferry into the city proper. The people living there were a mixture of proper Amsterdammers who had been born and been living there ever since, various generations of migrants looking for cheap housing (and sometimes unofficially banned from other parts of the city) and people like us, only able to afford the housing there even if it wasn’t our first choice.
Eighteen years later and what was once industrial wasteland is now a hipster paradise. There are three different microbrew brewpubs in crawling distance of our house, house prices have literally tripled since we bought ours and Noord is hot. The old Noord is still there, but it is slowly being smothered under the influence of money and bourgeois tastes, gentrified.
I wish I could honestly say that this is the reason I’m moving out, but I’d be lying. The real reason is that having worked from home for the last three years and plan to continue doing so, my parents are not getting any younger and I could really do with a little bit more room in my house. All of which means I will be moving back to my birthplace in less than a month’s time, 500 metres from where my parents still live.
Today I set my signature to sell my house. The end of an era. Eighteen years I’ve lived here in Noord and I will miss it, but not enough to not move away.
